The Ontario government purchased $66 million worth of apparel for prison guards, police officers and other provincial employees over the past five years but has no idea where those garments are made, raising concerns that taxpayer money may be funding sweatshop labour.

While some jurisdictions, including Manitoba, Maine, and the cities of Ottawa, Los Angeles and Toronto have ethical sourcing policies that are designed to offer transparency about the conditions under which garments are made, Ontario does not.

“For the most part, the Ministries purchase through vendors who would manage their own supply chain,” said Alan Cairns, a spokesman for the ministry of government services. “We do not keep a list of where goods purchased under contract are specifically manufactured.”

Six months after the Rana Plaza collapse— a tragedy in which more than 1,110 workers died in Bangladesh while making clothing for western companies such as Loblaw — there is renewed scrutiny of western retailers, apparel makers and governments over safety conditions and workers rights at garment factories throughout the developing world.

The only information Ontario currently provides to the public are the names of vendors who have sold more than $10,000 worth of supplies to the province—a list of companies over the past five years that includes Winners, Sears Canada, Canada Goose, and Holt Renfrew.

Cairns said vendors doing business with Ontario are governed by Canadian laws, establishing worker age and wage minimums for Canada-based employees. But workers rights activists say Canada’s largest province, which spent $12.5 million on clothing during 2012-13 alone, puts workers overseas at risk with its refusal to introduce an ethical sourcing policy.

“The government of Ontario clearly has no idea where or under what conditions its products are being made and has no policy in place that would give them that kind of information,” said Kevin Thomas, an analyst with the Shareholder Association for Research and Education (SHARE), a leader in the ethical investment field.

Bob Jeffcott, a policy analyst with Toronto-based Maquila Solidarity Network, said Ontario is making an outdated assumption that most apparel is still made in Canada when it’s become typical for apparel contracts to be outsourced abroad.

“Conditions under which goods are produced in other countries are obviously not affected by the laws of Ontario or Canada,” Jeffcott said.

Some retailers have responded to public pressure by signing up to one of two international accords that have been formed to audit factories for safety conditions. Loblaw and other members of those accords have promised to spend millions of dollars to improve factory conditions.

Some jurisdictions are trying to improve their own oversight.

Tim Reeve, a Vancouver-based supply chain consultant, said 20 Canadian municipalities, among them Ottawa, Edmonton and Vancouver, are members of an umbrella group that discuses issues such as demanding apparel vendors disclose factory names and locations.

Reeve said factory disclosure alone isn’t enough. There also needs to be funds committed to safety audits of factories and a pledge to disclose the results of those audits, measures that would put further pressure on companies and jurisdictions to stop using factories that are unsafe.

“The truth is that procurement staff are maxed out,” Reeve said. “They feel like having a policy alone is enough right now, unless there’s a directive from city council to do more.”

Still, there are examples of jurisdictions with measures Ontario might follow.

Los Angeles, for instance, commits $50,000 a year to auditing factories that make clothing for municipal employees.

The U.S. state of Maine demands vendors that bid for apparel contracts disclose the names and locations of factories where clothing will be made. Maine also insists that vendors commit to hand over 1 per cent of the total value of a contract towards a fund that can be used for factory audits.

Those audits are only done following a complaint about safety or workers rights abuses and must be done by an independent third party.

Since Maine introduced its policy in 2001, it has resulted in one investigation, which resulted in a contract being cancelled, said Jennifer Smith, a spokeswoman for the state.

Ontario was asked in 2005 by a group of activists including Oxfam, the Canadian Labour Congress and the Canadian Auto Workers to introduce an ethical sourcing policy, but refused to implement one at the time, Thomas said.

Jeffcott points out that Canadians have been caught up in garment scandals before Rana Plaza.

In 2003, activists discovered that Vancouver has purchased firefighter apparel made in Burma, even thought the country faced sanctions for the its poor human rights record.

Five years later, in 2008, a watchdog group revealed that the largest school uniform supplier in Ontario, R.J. McCarthy, which made uniforms for many Catholic schools in the province, was in violation of its own anti-sweatshop policies.

An investigation by the Workers Rights Consortium found that workers at the Liang Long Socks Ltd. factory in Zhuji City, China, were sleeping in unheated dormitories and being forced to work overtime for free in a factory deemed dirty, unhealthy and unsafe.

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